The Making of a Litmus Test

By WALTER ISAACSON

Chicago's mayoral race goes down to the wire, and the mire

There may be other issues in the Chicago election in addition to the fact that Democrat Harold Washington, 60, an undistinguished Congressman with a disconcerting disregard for filing income tax returns happens to be black, and that Republican Bernard Epton, 61, an equally undistinguished former state legislator happens to be white. But it was getting increasingly hard to find any. The racial partisanship that dragged the mayoral race to a new low last week removed any doubt that next Tuesday's election was, alas, likely to turn out to be essentially a black-and-white matter.

It was mainly because he is black that Washington was able to win the Democratic nomination over Jane Byrne, the current mayor, and Richard Daley, son of the legendary mayor. They split the votes of the white population, while Washington took more than 80% of the city's black vote, which makes up 41% of the electorate. And now it is mostly because he is black that Washington faces a tight battle against a Republican who otherwise could have counted on little more than the votes of his family and a few close friends.

Bigotry spewed into the open on Palm Sunday, when Washington, accompanied by former Vice President Walter Mondale, went to pray at St. Pascal Church at the invitation of the pastor. NIGGER DIE was freshly spray-painted on one door of the Roman Catholic church on the city's lily-white northwest side. "Carpetbagger!" an angry crowd of about 200 standing outside shouted at Mondale. A cordon of police was needed to protect the pair as they quickly departed.

Mondale, who had endorsed Daley in the primary, was part of a parade of national Democratic leaders who went to Chicago to appeal for party unity and cultivate black voters. Congressman Claude Pepper of Florida, the octogenarian hero of the elderly, also was booed by a white audience last week. Douglas Fraser, the president of the United Auto Workers, confronted the race issue headon. Said he: "This election would have been over the day after the primary except that Harold Washington is black." Ohio Senator John Glenn said the Chicago campaign showed that "we're at the hardest part of the civil rights movement... How do you change hearts and minds?" One prominent personality the Washington campaign has been keeping out of the picture lately is the Rev. Jesse Jackson, aggressive leader of the civil rights group Operation Push. At Washington's primary victory party, Jackson led a cry of "We want it all!," which Epton supporters are now using as an anti-Washington slogan.

The once fabled local Democratic machine is hardly putting forth the type of effort that has kept city hall in party hands for half a century. Byrne endorsed Washington after her primary defeat, then decided to oppose him through a write-in bid, then decided not to. Few of the machine's 50 ward bosses have offered their nominal nominee much help, and last week Alderman Roman Pucinski became the eighth of them openly to endorse the Republican. He said he could not ask his present workers to support Washington, who has pledged to abolish the patronage power of the party machine. Said Pucinski: "Why should I give him the guillotine with which to chop off my head?" At one rally in a Democratic neighborhood last week, formerly staunch Democrats serenaded Epton with a campaign song to the tune of Bye Bye Blackbird.

Some Chicagoans are wearing vividly telling campaign buttons. One shows a watermelon with a black slash across it. Another is simply all white, as if there were really nothing more to say. T shirts are similarly emblazoned. VOTE RIGHT, VOTE WHITE read some.

Epton, a Jewish millionaire and successful lawyer, is an unlikely hero for Chicago's ethnic neighborhoods. He is certainly no racist, himself, and once marched in Memphis in memory of the late Martin Luther King Jr. But his newest ads have played on the underlying theme of the election with the tag line: EPTON--BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE. The Chicago Tribune characterized Epton's constant disavowals of race as an issue as "the ring of a man who doth protest too much."

The numbers still seem to favor Washington: assuming he gets almost all of the black vote, he will need only 20% white support to win. But polls show that he may have trouble. In just two weeks, according to one local poll, Epton has cut by half Washington's once-commanding 28-point lead.

Many of Epton's new fans cite nonracial reasons for opposing Washington, who in 1972 served a month in jail for failing to file income tax returns for four years. Washington, whose birthday is April 15, claims he "forgot" about the requirement, an explanation that may not win a lot of hearts and minds from voters wrestling with their 1040 forms. He also had his license to practice law suspended in 1969 for failing to perform legal services for which he had been retained. In any normal campaign, these issues would, of course, be serious enough. Writes New York Times Columnist William Safire: "If Mr. Washington were white, would it be remotely conceivable that his jail term and suspension from practice would not be pointed out on television by his opponent?" Yet his record is doubtless being used by some as a disingenuous rationale for voting against a black. In a satirical fantasy, Tribune Columnist Bill Granger describes Washington and Epton waking up one day with their skin colors miraculously switched: those in front of St. Pascal Church who had attacked Washington as a "crook" quickly reverse field and boo the now black Republican as a "Nixon lover."

The struggle in Chicago may seem atavistic at a time when Americans would like to believe that overt bigotry is a diminishing phenomenon. There are now 15 major cities that have black mayors, including Los Angeles, Atlanta, New Orleans and Washington. In some ways Chicago is a special case: two-thirds of its neighborhoods are 95% white or 95% black. And because there is otherwise so little to choose between the two lackluster candidates, the outcome will surely be read, right or wrong, as a litmus test on color.

--By Walter Isaacson. Reported by Christopher Ogden/Chicago

With reporting by Christopher Ogden/Chicago This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.